


This is No Maybe

by robocryptid



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Love Confessions, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-15 00:45:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19284625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robocryptid/pseuds/robocryptid
Summary: Jesse’s got blood on his hands that he can never wash off, and so does Hanzo, but the voice that comes with his nightmares tells him they’re different, because he’snotdifferent. Hanzo’s a changed man, and Jesse’s still the same one he’s always been. Just got a shinier coat of paint now.A man like Jesse doesn’t deserve something like love, but he won’t be the one to end it either.





	This is No Maybe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Feribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feribe/gifts).



> Disclaimer: Since I am sometimes asked: you have my blanket permission to podfic, translate or remix my stuff, make fan art, make fanmixes, etc. -- basically anything that qualifies as transformative works! You don't have to ask me. The only thing I do ask is that you share it with me, because I wanna see/hear/read it! 
> 
> What you do not have permission to do is wholesale copy and repost my fic to a different platform, such as a third-party app that profits from free fan labor. If you are reading this on an app like that, I assure you AO3's website on mobile is perfectly robust, allows downloads of fics for offline reading, has a [dark mode skin](https://archiveofourown.org/skins/929), and isn't trying to scam you by offering premium services that change nothing.#
> 
> \--
> 
> Last month, I had a giveaway on my Twitter, and [Feribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feribe) was the winner of a one-shot fic. They requested some angsty Jesse feeling undeserving of Hanzo, first time love confessions, a date under the stars, and a happy ending. Here's what I came up with!

#

The first time Jesse realizes it, they’re on the beach, and he’s explaining the constellations. Hanzo knows a few, but he doesn’t know about Rabbit Tracks or Átse Etsoh, and he lets Jesse go on about them, patiently sipping at the whiskey they brought while Jesse’s sits forgotten at his side.

Jesse’s pointing at the sky and talking about how growing old ought to mean gaining something instead of losing out, and he glances to the side to find Hanzo’s smile sitting like a secret in the corners of his mouth. It’s small, the tiniest reminder that Hanzo indulges Jesse’s passions, even those far more ridiculous than this one, and Jesse thinks: this is it.

He wraps up his story and takes up his own drink, overwhelmed by the sheer force of it. It feels like the wide open, star-spattered sky or the ocean only meters away: pretty enough from a distance, but terrifying if he spends too long contemplating the magnitude. It doesn’t make him feel smaller like either of those do, but suddenly Hanzo inspires the same awe as nature’s brutal vastness.

Jesse doesn’t say any of it out loud. He picks apart one of the pastries Hanzo brought along, tearing off the driest parts to save the custard center for last, and he lets eating excuse him from speaking until he can pull himself back together.

 

* * *

 

He can’t forget it exactly, but he can set it aside and try to go on as usual.

At least until a few days later. This time, he looks up from reading to catch Hanzo staring. Hanzo doesn’t look away, only smiles softly, and Jesse feels something like vertigo.

It happens again, and again, and again.

During a meeting, Hanzo and Lena share a glance and a smirk, a silent inside joke passing between them. It’s evidence that Hanzo’s made a life here, and Jesse’s throat gets suddenly tight.

On a rooftop in Istanbul, Jesse reports that he’s fine, makes another joke out of another near miss. Hanzo’s relieved voice vibrates through the comm, and Jesse’s head fills with a dense, ringing static that only Hanzo’s laugh can cut through.

Back on base, lying sore and sated in the afterglow, this one’s almost expected in hindsight, except it didn’t happen during sex itself. Jesse watches Hanzo smooth his hair back up into its tie, a gesture that he’s always found both comforting and unbearably attractive. Then Hanzo pulls on a t-shirt in the half light and it fits all wrong, and he lets out this soft snort when he realizes it’s Jesse’s. He tugs it back off and chucks it playfully at Jesse’s head. Jesse wants to be playful too, but he can barely breathe from realizing he could happily spend the rest of his life watching Hanzo dress and undress and tie up his hair.

He’s been in love before, he thinks. Maybe.

But this is no _maybe_.

His first instinct is to run. He’s been back with Overwatch too long anyway. He’s starting to feel that old itch in his feet.

He can’t do it though. It’d be unfair to Hanzo; even if he’s not as far in as Jesse is, even if it might not _hurt_ him, it’d leave him confused. Jesse owes him better than to vanish without a trace, and he’s too big a coward to tell him the plan and risk his questions or the look on Hanzo’s face. Jesse doesn’t know if it’d be worse to see pain or confusion or an utter lack of surprise.

So he’s careful to manage the time they spend together, but he won’t run. Not today anyway.

His second instinct is to lie to himself. This was only ever supposed to be something to pass the time. He doesn’t want attachments, least of all to someone like Hanzo. It will wear off eventually. He monitors himself closely, doles out his affection with Hanzo in small doses in anticipation of the day the feeling disappears.

His third instinct is to remind himself Hanzo’s still an ornery bastard. He’s arrogant, at least when he isn’t swinging too far the other direction and sucking all the air out of the room. His jokes can be mean and he frowns too much and he acts like he’s never made a damn bed before.

Jesse already knew all those things though. He knew about Hanzo’s past too, and it didn’t deter him nearly as long as it should have. Now that he knows who Hanzo _is_ , instead of who he _was_ , it’s not a deterrent at all.

Hanzo did something unspeakable, but he survived, and now he’s put in the work to be better. Jesse didn’t know him back then, but he knew him six months ago, and Hanzo’s changed even in that short time. Jesse knows the amount of effort it’s taken him to get this far. It’s _admirable_ , how much Hanzo’s managed to overcome.

When Jesse looks back, he’s not sure anyone would say the same about his own life.

He’s got blood on his hands that he can never wash off, and so does Hanzo, but the voice that comes with his nightmares tells him they’re different, because he’s _not_ different. Hanzo’s a changed man, and Jesse’s still the same one he’s always been. Just got a shinier coat of paint now.

He knows it when he feels his blood sing after a kill, and when he feels smug after a good fight. He knows it when he reads the old news reports about Overwatch, when he thinks about the spaces between the lines that Blackwatch filled. He knows it when he thinks about the things he fucked up, and the things he excelled at; both resulted in lives lost and livelihoods ruined.

He talks a big game about second chances, but he can feel in his bones that men like him don’t really get redemption. Not as long as the part of him remains that enjoys the job.

Everyone who’s ever mattered has left him or betrayed him. Even the ones who didn’t mean it that way, whose lives simply took them elsewhere — like Angie and Fareeha, like Genji — they still left.

It feels inevitable that Hanzo will too. It’d be the smart thing to do. Jesse wants him to, but he also doesn’t.

A man like Jesse doesn’t deserve something like love, but he won’t be the one to end it either. He’ll take what he can get, even if it’s only a facsimile of what he wants, even if he has to limit how much he can handle at one time. He can’t leave anyway. Just like with Overwatch, Jesse doesn’t have it in him to stay away from Hanzo, no matter how much it’s gonna hurt in the end.

Now that he’s properly given it a name, it slips in easier than before, like a knife between his ribs. It stops his breathing, parches his throat, causes a thousand tiny physiological reactions, and like a fool he comes back for more.

Tonight they’ve been drinking again. It’s dangerous; Jesse’s got the words ringing in his head again, and it doesn’t help things when Hanzo’s like this, loose-limbed with a faint flush in his cheeks, more tactile than he’s been in a while. He keeps looking at Jesse in a way that’s almost shy, which is as devastatingly charming as it is unusual.

He touches Jesse’s arm, and his waist, and his cheek, and that last feels so achingly tender that Jesse has to do something — _anything_ — to stop it. He drags Hanzo into the bed, and he thinks the best distraction is to ride Hanzo fast and hard, but Hanzo, the traitor, seems to be in a different mood.

He kisses Jesse soft and lazy, the way Jesse likes and usually has to coax _him_ into slowing down for. Hanzo’s fingers are tight on his jaw, and that’s enough to ground him until they too grow softer and sweep instead into Jesse’s hair.

Jesse’s perilously close to losing control, needs to redirect this to something that makes him feel less shaky and exposed, but he can’t abide taking anything away that Hanzo might want, and so he surrenders to it, lets Hanzo kiss him however and wherever he wants to.

Hanzo’s fingers are in his hair and dragging rough calluses across the scar on his ribs. He tucks kisses into the space behind Jesse’s ear and the hollow of his throat, and when they pull away it’s like they pull the word out with them. “Stay,” Jesse croaks.

Then he freezes, and he knows Hanzo can feel it, because he stops what he’s doing and his eyes go intent and focused. “I am right here,” he answers, and he attempts a smile but there’s a tension to it. Curiosity, Jesse thinks. Caution too.

He doesn’t know how to answer that, but he’s pretty sure he just broke whatever was holding them together, because as the silence expands, Hanzo withdraws. He sits up and shakes his head as if to himself. Hanzo stares at his hands now, clenching them tight enough that Jesse can picture the nail marks he’s leaving in his palms, and Jesse knows it’s his fault, but he still doesn’t have the words.

“Have I—” Hanzo begins to ask, then he shakes his head again. “I don’t know what to do.”

Jesse can’t tell him, because that one word was all of it, one tiny syllable to capture at least half the reasons Hanzo shouldn’t stay at all. “I’m sorry. It didn’t mean anything.” The sound Hanzo makes says he knows Jesse’s full of shit. “I mean it’s not you. You’re alright, darlin’. More than alright. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Jesse still doesn’t think Hanzo believes him, but at least Hanzo nods, and his shoulders drop from where they were hunched up nearly to his ears, and his hands unclench. He turns, too slowly, and he looks at Jesse again, his eyes piercing, searching Jesse’s face for a moment before they go soft again. “I would like to. To stay with you.” He laughs, softly and without any humor. “I thought—”

“What?” Jesse asks too quickly.

“I thought you didn’t— I thought I was giving you what you wanted.” Hanzo clears his throat.

“What I _wan_ —”

It hits Jesse then, right between the eyes. He thinks about that night at the beach. The whole thing was Hanzo’s idea but meticulously arranged to Jesse’s tastes: the beach, the whiskey. The pastries that Hanzo’s sweet tooth allowed him to enjoy but that he would never have bought for himself. Hanzo’s patient indulgence for Jesse’s rambling about constellations.

He thinks about Hanzo learning the way he likes his coffee. Learning where and how Jesse stores Peacekeeper’s cleaning kit and keeping it stocked. Failing utterly to learn to cook but still buying the foods Jesse likes the most. Leaving him flowers, or funny notes, or the little origami cactus that still sits at Jesse’s bedside.

He thinks about how those things have all petered off, and about how maybe that started after the beach. About how Hanzo hasn’t done anything like it since. He thinks about trying to hold all his feelings at bay, and finally, he thinks about how that must have looked to Hanzo.

Jesse thinks he’s probably a fucking idiot.

He scrubs a hand over his face, tugs at his beard, then he looks at Hanzo again. Hanzo looks guarded. Confused. _Wounded_. And Jesse’s the one who did it.

The belief that he shouldn’t be allowed to have this surges back with a vengeance and threatens to choke him, but he fights past it. “Is it too cliché to say ‘it’s not you, it’s me’?” Hanzo snorts but he doesn’t answer, like he’s decided for them both that Jesse’s not done talking. “I want you here, with me. I wanna see you every morning. I miss you when you aren’t around.” Hanzo’s face is still skeptical, but it’s slowly transforming into something like _hopeful_ , and it eats Jesse up to know that wasn’t there before. “I’m sorry if I ever made you think that wasn’t it. It’s not you. It’s me, bein’ an idiot, because I’ve never—”

This is where he stops, because trying to repair an injury is fine, but maybe it’s self-indulgent to take it too far. Maybe then it’s not for Hanzo, but for him, and maybe Hanzo wanted a little reassurance but he isn’t ready for the burden of Jesse’s devotion.

Then Hanzo, hushed and still looking so hopeful, asks, “Never what?”

His dark eyes are wide and vulnerable, and Jesse’s never been able to refuse that face. “Never loved anybody like this before.” There’s a void of profound silence, and he races to fill it up. “I love you. And it scares the shit outta me, because I think there’s no way you’d ever feel the sa—”

“Stop,” Hanzo says, and Jesse’s mouth seems to shut on its own. He’s not sure if he’s grateful for it or more afraid than ever. He doesn’t have much time to panic, though, before Hanzo’s feverishly hot mouth is on his again, swallowing Jesse’s gasp and a few of his doubts. Hanzo seems too caught up to realize at first that he left Jesse hanging, but he finally breaks off long enough to say, “I love you too.”

Jesse laughs into the next kiss, relieved but still uncertain, but each subsequent kiss makes it harder to disbelieve. He may not think he deserves this, but he’s still sure _Hanzo_ deserves to have whatever will make him happy. If that happens to be Jesse, he’ll have to learn to accept that it’s just one more thing his luck’s gonna let him get away with.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The rest of the prompt was: _Hanzo gearing up towards telling Jesse that he loes him, aided by a proud but cautious Genji who knows how skittish and reserved Jesse can be with his heart, who suggests to Hanzo a little stargazing picnic, because Jesse knows a lot about the stars and feels confident under an open sky._
> 
> I went a little off track from this part of the prompt, but consider it Hanzo's POV. ;)


End file.
